


don't take the money

by dustorange



Category: Batman: The Animated Series, DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Gen, Getting back the things you love(d), Hurt/Comfort, Justice, Marriage, Somewhat Long Halloween-compliant, but not that much comfort, kinda ???, talia🤝harvey - being the best rogues and also deeply impt to bruce
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:54:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25770004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustorange/pseuds/dustorange
Summary: “You weren’t there,” Talia tries.“That’s the problem,” Bruce says. “That’s the problem.”Bruce, and Talia, and Harvey through the years.
Relationships: Harvey Dent & Bruce Wayne, Talia al Ghul & Bruce Wayne, Talia al Ghul/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 6
Kudos: 57





	don't take the money

**Author's Note:**

> i could not stop thinking about those panels on tumblr from that btas book with talia and bruce in paris bc i thought that was how they met in that universe but it turns out that it is not SO i wrote it anyway and then i started thinking about harvey and the seasons and [that bleachers song](https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bleachers/donttakethemoney.html) and brutalia and hOW WHEN THE WORLD IS JUST YOU WILL GET BACK WHAT YOU PAID and how harvey is tied to COINS and that means he and b will be reunited and sadkfjjhs

* * *

**_MARCH 29, 1998._ **

Enter Talia al Ghul. Dark-eyed. Hair slick and straight from the cold Parisian rain. Brown striped suit with modest shoulderpads and an expensive maroon tag — he’s at a cafe in the 3e arrondissement with a glass of icewater on the rickety black wire table between them — and she steals away the main affair of the drink (the olive), and approximately all the air in his throat, and lungs, and soul.

She says, “You’re Henri’s boy?” and pops the olive into her mouth.

Bruce has been pretending to read the Figaro for the last half-hour, the newspaper’s white background blending gray-black with the dampness of the dark spring air until he can almost see right through it. It suits him well enough. Through it he’s catalogued the sound, look, and stale metallic smell of every person in this cafe and the fifteen meter radius the moment they enter it. 

He had not, however, catalogued her:

“I must have missed you come in,” he tells her, throat dry, heart fast, setting the paper down, “and I’m sorry to tell you, but this table is taken.”

The dark smears beneath her eyeliner must be from the rain. She lifts an eyebrow like the statement is novel, propping a fist against her cheek. 

“I offer you my sincerest apology,” she says, insincerely.

“Hm,” Bruce says. “Hm. Apology accepted.” 

“But you’ll notice there are no other tables available, monsieur, so you’ll have to excuse my company for now.”

Bruce licks his lips. Pauses. “I retract my acceptance.”

“Where I’m from there aren’t retractions on forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness is contingent upon recognition of wrongdoing and apology, and apologies are contingent upon changed action,” is what he says, instead of what we wants to say, which is _where is that?_ or maybe _stay a while please._ “Therefore I accept no guilt in the retraction.”

“Ah,” she says.

Bruce is nineteen-almost-twenty, and now in love, and it has been two and a half years since he scratched out a note on a yellow legal pad for Alfred and scraped his knee on his way out the window, and it has been one and a half years since Tsunetmo sent him to Matsuda and Matsuda sent him to Kirigi, and it has been ten months since he banged on Henri Ducard’s door off Avenue Montaigne in dead night until his knuckles split open like grapefruit and the man answered and agreed to train him. He cannot remember when, exactly, was the last time he spoke to someone like this, fast and soft and sharp and easy, pulling, or the last time he spoke to someone like him.

She doesn’t say anything else for a long time after that, only wraps her fingers around the glass of icewater and looks at him — he nods — and she drinks it and pays for the bill for that glass only, which is €2.76 and they both murmur, _Outrageous_ , at the same time, and she frowns at him and looks surprised he spoke. The cup leaves a glistening ring where she puts it back on the table, transparent impressions of her fingers on the otherwise unbroken condensation of the cup.

She says, “I had supposed you were very rich.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” he says, surreptitiously crossing a leg over his knee to tuck the tag of his brown Ferragamo loafers back into the shoe. Her unimpressed look tells him it is not as casual as he wants. He feels exposed.

“Intelligence reports are not.”

“You —” Bruce clears his throat, fixes his gaze pointedly away from her, on the lone gentleman on the patio. “You’ve been watching me.”

“Ducard took an interest in you,” she says, leaning back, “— a shine to you. People are interested in what he thinks.”

Ducard is a bitter man with a good French _r_ , and he still says things like ‘the opposite sex,’ and ‘élan vital’ even though it is, regrettably, no longer 1915. He’s brutal and stoic and stronger than almost anyone Bruce ever met. Bruce appreciates him. He does not like him.

“Doors are always opening, Mr. Wayne,” she says, and stands. “Come with me.”

“Sorry,” says Bruce — there is a blade strapped to her thigh and another at her waist that bulges under the fabric of her clothes when she moves up and she knows _his name_ — and smiles tightly, “I’m not finished with my paper.”

(He does not say no.)

She pulls her chair back out. It scrapes. She sits, and props her head on a hand, staring at the now stiff-dry, still-translucent newspaper draped over the table. 

He flips a page, licks a thumb; she waits. Then.

“What are you reading?” 

Bruce glances down at the bleeding newsprint. “German cockroaches,” he reads leisurely. “They’re descending upon the city.”

“And what of American roaches?”

A startled laugh scratches its way out of his throat. He does not let himself sit stunned, says, “I hear they’re leaving.”

And so he leaves, and so they leave together. They’re silent. She walks two steps ahead, and he lets her because he won’t give her the victory of altering his stride. The wet wind tosses her hair and his open peacoat around, and the streetvendors’ arms are dotted with raindrops as they call out white tulip prices, grenadine prices, newspaper prices. She disappears and reappears around sandstone corners. He realizes it’s a goosechase after she suggests they see the Gioconda; it’s not her trying to lead him anywhere, it’s her trying to see if he’s good enough to be led and not lost; and he’s grown suspicious enough that he’s about to vanish into thin air when they arrive at the Tuileries, and a black car pulls off of the bitume, a couple inches from their feet, splashing clear streetwater across their ankles. 

She turns back to look at him, eyes _bright,_ the faint impression of a dimple in her cheek, and then there is a knife at his throat. If he glances down to look at it, his throat will flay. “It’s been a lovely afternoon.”

There’s three silhouettes in the car. Bruce would start with the passenger side and then the man in the backseat. By the time the driver opened his door and reached Bruce, his peers would be unconscious. 

He waits for the doors to open, blood pounding in his temples, his throat. He slips his right hand into a fist.

The doors do not open.

“I’ll be in touch, Bruce Wayne,” she says, and stops. Gaze flickering to the dirty sidewalk then the shining car then back to him, newly hardened which implied a former new softness. Then. “We’ll be in touch.”

She leans close, breath warm on his cool cheek, and presses something sharp and then something soft into his left hand and slips away into the car, which rolls off as soon as her door is shut. 

He watches the black shape until it disappears, clear rain bearing down on his head again, soaking him; the air’s freezing, and he feels its coldness all at once, suddenly, like a realized absence and not a new presence. It makes his teeth ache when he breathes in.

He wraps the soaked wool of his coat around him, presses the contents in his palm into a pocket, breathes hot air into his cold, pale hands, and goes back to Ducard. 

He throws the soft note he finds in his pocket into the flames smoldering in Ducard’s stone fireplace — he does not entertain tricks and he does not entertain the idea of abandoning Ducard before he has learned absolutely everything there is to learn. Then and only then will he return to Gotham — nowhere else. The paper crackles and blackens and warms his hands. 

The hard needle in his pocket is a knife. Damascus steel. Because a weapon is more common here than a letter, he feels safe enough to hand it to Ducard over plain half-burnt bread and hot tea that night, who gives him a new slip of paper with an address and a name to request an audience with when he gets there and gives back the banded metal knife and says, harshly, “Do not lose this.” 

He leaves again. He does not go home.

* * *

  
  


**_JUNE 6, 2000._ **

The wedding’s quick, and it’s hushed, and he can’t tell if someone’s beating a daf outside the balcony or if it’s his heart. Then it’s done.

“Talia,” he says, that night.

His lips still burn from kissing her cheeks, her forehead, her; a quiet warmth that lingers. The summer air is sticky-hot, and full of the scent of spent embers and old bread from the bakery below their room that they visited earlier in the evening. His hand is sweaty in hers, and he feels bad, but also doesn’t and wants to keep it this way forever. 

They’re sitting cross-legged on the bed, passing a circle of khoubz to each other and dropping breadcrumbs into the crisp, thousand-count white sheets. 

She tears a hunk off of the bread with her teeth. Her eyes lift to his, and she grins, the breadcrust between her sharp teeth. “Bruce.”

“Talia.”

“Bruce.”

Bruce drops his head down, chin knocking his chest to cover up his smile. Her knees bump against his, and his cheeks start to ache. Is he supposed to be this happy? Is it allowed? 

“Talia —” he says, and stops. “I’m. I’m glad.”

His gaze is still cast to his lap. She passes bread to him wordlessly; neither of them have much to say now, or ever, but the silence is —

He doesn’t mind it. 

“There was a story I heard as a child,” she says suddenly, a little roughly, and he looks up, startled. “There was a poor man with a balcony. His neighbor owned a bakery.” Her hand falls to the starched sheets, gesturing vaguely downstairs. “They lived so close together they always encountered each other. The poor man was so very poor, he had nothing to eat, and he couldn’t afford to go outside and buy the food so he stopped leaving the house.

“He only had the balcony, so he would go there and breathe in the air and all of the wonderful smells from the bakery, and one day the baker noticed. He said the poor man was stealing. The scent of the bread belonged to him like the bread belonged to him. He said _I must be paid for those smells_ and he took the poor man to a judge. The judge says _Did you smell his bread?_ Yes _. Did you enjoy the smells?_ Yes. _Did you pay for them? ..._ No. The judge told him to come back with — I don’t know, precisely, it was a long time ago — five dirhams, maybe.”

“Is that a lot?” Bruce jokes flatly, raising an eyebrow to bring to mind the wealth they both come from, and Talia grins and shoves him lightly. Bruce catches her hands and holds her thumbs to her palm, his fingers wrapped around hers, and grins. He would never guess that she had killed people unless he knew. He would never guess. His smile drops. His stomach sinks.

“The poor man has nothing. Nothing. He says _Why must I pay? I haven’t stolen anything, I have nothing, I only went outside and breathed in what was there and that was all I had. That was everything I had._ He goes around town and borrows the money and he knows he’ll never be able to pay it back. He’s so sick, he’s miserable. The judge asks if he has the money and he says yes, and the judge tells him to put the coins in the judge’s copper bowl, and he does it. One by one. He’s never getting it back. But he pays for what he had for only a second. For the silly pleasure he got. So. The coins. They all clink. The judge says _Did you hear that?_ to the baker, who wants his money. The baker says yes. He says _Did you enjoy that?_ The baker says _Oh yes I certainly did._ And the judge says that that is his payment and gives the poor man back his coins. The end.”

“Wh—” says Bruce. “Is that it?”

Talia takes the bread back from him and takes a sharp bite. “Yes.”

“The ending was so abrupt.”

She chews. “Justice is abrupt.”

They sit in silence again. He loves her and has learned from her and her father and the others in the League; they have made him into something that could save Gotham. He loves her. 

But his chest tightens, and then doesn’t untighten, and their ending, months later, is abrupt, too.

* * *

  
  


**_SEPTEMBER 30, 2003._ **

Gotham’s in the thick of autumn now. The skinny crimschmidt oak on the left of GCPD headquarters is blowing dry leaves onto the pea gravel with the pull of the wind that rasps at Bruce’s scarf. Bruce breathes in the crisp, familiar fall air. They’re on the rooftop, a few feet from the Batsignal, a few yards from where Batman has stood with Gordon and Harvey countless nights. Harvey wanted to show it to him. He doesn’t know.

“Harv,” says Bruce, hands in his pockets, “should we be —”

“I said it’s fine, Bruce. What, you don’t trust me?” Harvey asks, turning around, and it Bruce’s mouth drops open to insist that he _does,_ of course he does, before the thought even registers in his head. 

“I do, with — with _anything,”_ he says intensely, thoughtlessly, and means it; and then his brain catches up. To defuse the tension from his words and the strange tension growing in Harvey’s stiffened shoulders, he adds, “But with all the late nights these days…”

“Bruce,” Harvey rolls his eyes, but he smiles softly. “You know who you sound like? You know who?”

“Gilda,” says Bruce at the same time that Harvey says, “Like Gilda.”

“Quite the compliment, coming from you,” Bruce teases while he adjusts his scarf so the cashmere covers the bruises where Solomon Grundy nearly snapped his neck two nights ago. The wind blows hard. It makes the scabs on his knuckles feel stiff like they’re about to burst. Alfred told him to wear gloves. He didn’t listen. “Try not to fall in love with me too.”

Harvey’s cheeks go red from the cold. He looks away, kicking the toe of his scuffed leather loafers into the pea gravel, the way Bruce has seen him do here a hundred times at night but never at day. 

“...She understands. She does. It’s just.” 

A silence.

“It’s hard,” Bruce murmurs, looking away suddenly, “it’s just hard.”

The gravel crunches. 

“...Yeah.”

Bruce looks up; Harvey’s closer, close enough that Bruce can study the bags under his piercing dark brown eyes and the slight oily sheen to his hair that the flattering restaurant lights had hidden during lunch, that darkness had hidden during nights. The DA’s office’s taken a toll on him; a heavy one. But Bruce wouldn’t have anyone else there. 

“Why’d you want to come up here anyway?” asks Bruce, finally, when they’ve stared at each other long enough that their mouths both quirk up the way they did in the stupid staring contests they’d had as children. Alfred always thought Harvey Dent was trouble.

Harvey won’t quit looking at him. He pauses, like he hadn’t planned to speak and the question threw him off. Shrug. “I like it up here.”

“...On top of police headquarters?” Bruce raises an eyebrow, feigning ignorance and feeling guilty.

“I’ve been doing things,” Harvey says hesitantly, glancing up. He shoves his hands in his pocket. “Working with the police department. Some others too. Off the clock.”

“Harv,” Bruce says again, cautious and helpless and well-aware he’s walking into a secret he already knows and deeper into the pit of keeping Harvey in the dark. 

He wants to tell him, he should tell him, _Harvey, it’s me, I’m Batman. It’s been me every night._ He wants to tell him. But how can he put that weight on Harvey? How could he possibly have the right to saddle him with that burden?

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like — that.”

“Harvey, what?” Bruce looks up and catches a glimpse of the expression on Harvey’s face — betrayal — the instant before he covers it up.

“Like you’re disappointed in me. It’s this town, Bruce. It’s this town, you can’t play by the rules here, you just can’t.”

Bruce wants to say, I know, I know, I know, I’ve never been disappointed in you, I’m disappointed in myself, but he says, “I know what you mean.”

Harvey grabs him by the shoulder and pulls him in for a hug and Bruce tells him to give Gilda his best and they part ways. Tonight Gordon will spread out a file in his office because Carmine Falcone’s nephew will get shot in the head at 8 o’clock and Bruce will watch as he lays out the evidence and Harvey will say _If you ask me, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy_ and mean it. 

Now, Bruce descends the staircase into the greater GCPD headquarters and pretends not to notice the strange looks he receives in the stairway or the yelling from behind the commissioner’s door.

“You were right, Alfred,” Bruce remarks absently when he climbs into the towncar and shuts the door, peering out the window and up at the rooftop, “I should have brought gloves.”

* * *

  
  


**_JANUARY 14, 2004._ **

“I heard.”

“Why are you here.”

“I _heard.”_

Bruce scoffs. “From who?”

Talia doesn’t answer. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I know—I _know_ how much he meant to you.” She doesn’t.

Bruce is in his father’s office, cheek to the window, facing the bust of his great grandfather. His fist pressed to his cheek. Thumb at his jaw. Blood from the clip by his ribs soaking the floral pattern of the armchair, the split of his knuckles staining the mahogany arms as he grips them. “Thank you.”

Talia goes quiet. She always does before she says something that he will regret, that he will wish she had never said at all. He can’t see any of her but a shadow.

“I suppose you think it’s your fault.”

His grip on the arm tightens. His voice is low, and a warning. “You weren’t there, Talia, you don’t know what it —”

“You weren’t there either,” she tries to console. 

“That’s the problem,” Bruce says. “That’s the problem.”

Talia crouches next to him. Up close, he can see her. She’s in pinstripes. A string of pearls dangling from her ears. Silver-brown scar that stops a millimeter before her left eye. She’s working with Luthor these days. She hates the man’s core and his disregard for nature; there must be something deeper. She must be planning to slough off his very roots. 

She folds her arms over the edge of the chair. “Would you tell me about him?”

“About...about Harvey?” Bruce asks, voice rough. 

Talia hums.

Dark brown eyes. The games of chess, swinging an arm around his shoulders. Spilling riesling on each other to have an excuse to sneak away from the gala and talk. When they’d grab hands by the wrist. Being the sort of good for Gotham that Bruce couldn’t. Late nights and casefiles and secrets. The way his left eye turned to opaque jelly from the acid. How his face boiled. 

“Maroni did it because I put him there. He did it because I gave him the chance. Harvey never would have been in that courtroom if I —”

Talia rubs his palm tenderly. “The world doesn’t revolve around you, Bruce Wayne.”

Bruce’s eyes shut. Long, wet breath. Fingers around hers. He tightens their handhold. 

_He was my best friend,_ he means to say, but what comes out is, “He was _all_ I — he was everything I had. And he paid for it.”


End file.
